Materialicious

A quick hello to everyone coming to my site from Materialicious - and thanks for featuring my work!

"Beginning" from the beginning

What, two blog posts in a week? Am I feeling OK? Yep - just finally have some time to sit down and update things. Here's another piece I got done over the summer:

I batted around the idea of titling this one "Just After the Big Bang" or "Origin of the Universe" or some such - but I decided to simplify. Nonetheless, to me it represents what the Universe could have looked like just a few Planck Time units after the Big Bang, with a lot of artistic license thrown in for good measure. I started with a simple egg-shaped surface in Rhino, then used the built-in Paneling Tools to array the hexagonal base unit over said surface. LOTS of flailing around and reiterating until I finally got something that would work. One complication of this particular design that normally doesn't occur in my Rhino work is the thickness of the material - because it incorporates repeating components, the thickness of each one must be allowed for in order for the pieces to properly form the correct final shape. This is one area that Rhino struggles in, as it employs surfaces that are zero-thickness rather than solids with volume like real-world sheet metal. I imported the surfaces into Solidworks and added the appropiate thickness, but then had to pull them back into Rhino to produce the correct patterns for the laser cutter - Solidworks is just too rigid to allow my crazy shapes to be modeled with its sheet metal tools. Go figure. Anyway, this is what I ended up with, pared down to a quarter of the whole form:

As you can see, each strip (color coded for clarity) is just slightly different from its neighbor, necessitating careful labeling in order to keep it all straight. It also takes someone who can handle simple arithmetic, like how many quarters it takes to make a whole - which I goofed on and had to order the other half after the fact. Oops. 2 X .25 is NOT 1. Below is the unrolled strips - half of them, anyway.

Evident on these strips are the bend lines, with mountain and valley folds color coded cyan and magenta. Keeping that sorted in my head was a source of continual stress. I ended up modifying a drill press vice to simplify bending the strips. The basic procedure can be seen below:

Once I had all the strips bent into these goofy accordian-like shapes, I was able to clamp them together and get a pretty decent tack with the TiG welder to glom them together. This was by far the most labor-intensive sculpture I've made so far.

As the strips went on, they gradually forced themselves into the desired egg-shape. I did have to tweak and clamp and swear and complain to compensate for small erors that grew larger over time, but it actually formed up pretty well.

This one was a real learning experience, forcing me to come up with all kinds of new techniques and procedures to get the job done. In other words, I loved it.

The frame you see in the top picture above is just for displaying "Beginning"; I envision this as a hanging piece in an atrium, stairwell, or foyer. The same techniques I empoyed here could be used on a much larger scale. I'd love to give it a whirl.

"Wellspring" creation, Part II

The sculpture sat, unloved, in the studio for quite a while as we sorted out a good install date. Eventually, it was time to load it up, haul it to Adams County, and install it. Getting it onto the trailer seemed to be a fearful task to a lot of my cohorts, but it ended up being a matter of a simple plan, well executed. I bought some heavy-duty casters (600 lb. load rating) and bolted them onto the exposed "legs" of the superstructure. This simplified the act of moving it into place on the trailer's deck, and it also made lifting the piece into a vertical orientation with the crane much easier. Next, I picked the base end up high enough to allow the trailer to roll underneath, and supported it that position with a crossmember of leftover square tubing and two of my super-badass "saw" horses.

Backed the trailer under the piece, removed the crossmember, picked up the top end, and rolled the sculpture to the fromt of the trailer. Wah. La. All that was left was strapping it down, slapping some hazard flags on it, and loading up the tools for the install the next day.

My little Tacoma did a fine job of hauling this rig, despite the weight - "Wellspring" tips the scales at just 850 pounds, but the trailer is a beefy one at around 3K. (Thanks go to fellow Guild member and all-around good guy Denny Haskew for the use of his trailer.) An hour and a half later, and National Sculptors' Guild honcho John Kinkade and I were on site, getting ready and waiting for our crane. It was a beautiful day, a beautiful crane, and a beautiful installation - we were done in less than an hour.

So, there you have it. Done.

 

"Wellspring" creation

After (finally) dedicating "Wellspring" last week, I thought it was high time to post a wrap-up of how it came into being. I leveraged Rhino's formidable toolset to model the entire thing in 3d on my computer.

Rhino includes some really powerful tools for "unrolling developable surfaces" - flattening out the curvy bits so they can be cut from sheet stock. I usually try to color code the parts so my simple mind has an easier time figuring out what goes where, which can become problematic when you're dealing with over two hundred pieces like I was here. I also model the footing and whatever anchoring hardware are called for by the engineer. This way I can at least pretend I've planned for any possible issues that might pop up regarding clearances and installation logistics, plus it makes accounting for a bill of materials a lot more accurate.

Once I've got that all squared away, I export a file of the pattern in a format that the cutting job shop can use to drive their cutting machine - in this case, a water jet.

I also modeled the internal superstructure of 3" stainless steel square tubing. Again, doing so insures that it fits properly within the base's envelope, plus it allows me to produce most of the sketches needed by the engineer directly from the 3d information.

Once the modeling, unrolling, and pattern making are done, I get to sit around nervously while the parts are all cut out. Any mistakes can be costly at this point, and I did manage to skip a couple pieces on this one. Sorting and identifying all the parts can be daunting and confusing, especially if many of them are just slightly different from one another. I should probably implement a better part labeling system at some point, dontcha think?

Now it's time for the real work to begin. I started with the 12 gauge parts of the base. One of the difficulties presented by working with stainless is temporarily holding the pieces in place in order to tack them together with the welder - 300 series stainless (this is 304) is non-magnetic, so the usual magnetic clamps are useless and mechanical ones have to suffice. They often don't, requiring some fancy gymnastics, some Rube-Goldbergian jigs, or a combination of the two.

The surface of all that stainless also needs to have a nice handmade swirl applied. Below is the top of the base, which is 1/4 inch plate.

Here is the superstructure being welded up, and then with the 1/4 inch top included:

 I then welded the aforementioned 12 gauge base sheets to the superstructure. Somehow, I've neglected to get a picture of the finished base before attaching it to the rest of the piece. Oops. With the base done, I moved on to the "frame" part of the sculpture, which is the outline of Adams County itself. I came to regret including all those jogs - which, BTW, is the part of the county that got chopped out to make Denver International Airport.

Next came the grass blades. I always like working on the curved parts, as they magically form themselves into the correct shape as you draw the edges together. Not so magical is the tranformation of the raw welded seams into nice clean corners. HOURS of grinding and honing, all by hand, all by yours truly. Weeeeeee.

After each blade is finished, it is added to the frame. The design is such that the grass blades act as stiffeners and reinforcements, adding lateral inegrity to the structure. In the pics below you can also see I'm test-fitting the mounting system for the acryllic circles - which represent an aerial view of center-point irrigation.

After attaching all three blades and welding up all the connections that were easily accessed from the top side, I needed to flip the whole thing over so I could do the same on the other side.

With all the welding and chasing (foundry ratspeak for grinding) done on the main upper portion of the sculpture, it's time to attach the base. This was by far the most technically challenging aspect of the fabrication, as the alignment of the frame to the base determines the attitude and verticality of the whole works. PLUS, the base outweighs the rest by 2-to-1, throwing the center of gravity way off from its previous location and making rigging and picking the thing much more complicated. PLUS the welded connection between the two is structurally critical. Lining it all up:

Once the alignment is good and the top side welded, I needed to flip it again to access the base/frame connection on the other side:

And then weld that up:

With the welding, grinding, and swirling completed, I needed to attach the acryllic circles. I'd fretted a bit about managing this without scratching the material, but it ended up taking about an hour to finish up.

At this point, the fabrication is finished. Ta. Da.

To Steve

I was shocked at how deeply the news of Steve Jobs' death affected me. There I was, standing in the back yard, looking up at a blue October sky blurred by tears. I had to look inward a bit, try to figure out just why this man I'd never met - whom I had no personal relationship with, and new nothing of beyond what his publicist and the tech punditry presented to me - had such a profound hold of my heart. Wandering around the internet, I found loads of people whose connection with him started with their first positive experience of computing on an Apple ][ or an early Macintosh. Many others cited the new freedom their iPod brought to their enjoyment and experience of music. But for me, I realized that Steve Jobs had nurtured a radical and transformative seed that had already germinated in my mind in 1988 when I bought my first Mac. That seed was the idea that beauty MATTERED - that the esthetic quality of anything and everything was the differentiating factor between a good experience and a bad one. His dedication to infusing mundane gadgets and heretofore boring and drab computing with style, grace, and capital-B Beauty was instrumental in forging my understanding of art and my desire to make it. I am an artist today at least in part because Steve Jobs made me feel it was something worth doing.

Thank you, Steve.

"Alliance" Model

"Alliance" Model - 5, originally uploaded by mark leichliter.

I've been having good results with 3d printing some of my designs for proposals. It definitely helps in understanding the form. The shitty iPhone picture - not so much.

Leviathan / Kapoor / Grand Palais 2011

Leviathan / Kapoor / Grand Palais 2011, originally uploaded by Co & Isa.

A fantastic piece in a stunning space. I'd love to make it to France to check this out.

Co & Isa's photostream contains some of the best shots I've seen of Kapoor's new knockout.

"Wellspring" Superstructure

"Wellspring" Superstructure, originally uploaded by mark leichliter.

With a whole bunch of help from Russ with Martino & Luth Structural Engineers, this is the internal structure that will hold the whole thing up.

"Wellspring" 2d Pattern

Wellspring 2d Pattern, originally uploaded by mark leichliter.

Part of the unrolled surfaces, ready to sent out for cutting. These are the 14 gauge stainless parts.

"Wellspring" - The Unroll

Wellspring Unroll, originally uploaded by mark leichliter.

This is a screen grab from Rhino3d, showing the 3d model and the component surfaces "unrolled" (flattened). The flattened shapes are grouped here by material (mostly stainless steel) and thickness (14 gauge, 12 gauge, and 1/4 inch stainless; plus 1/8th inch tinted polymer).